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Every Tuesday at 7:42 a.m. and 5:18 p.m., Tom Harte shares a few thoughts on food and shares recipes. A founder of “My Daddy’s Cheesecake,” a bakery/café in Cape Girardeau, a food columnist for The Southeast Missourian, and a cookbook author, he also blends his passion for food with his passion for classical music in his daily program, The Caffe Concerto.

The Chicken or the Egg

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's an age-old question but the Cambridge World History of Food, a massive work containing over two thousand pages and two million words, is not afraid to tackle it -- even if it does strattle the fence in its answer.

Acknowledging that from a biblical perspective chickens were created and thus must have existed prior to eggs, the book nonetheless points out that from an evolutionary perspective reptiles preceded the emergence of the first birds and thus eggs are millions of years older than chickens.

The smaller but at nearly one thousand pages still hefty Oxford Companion to Food doesn't address the question but unlike the Cambridge work it does describe five methods for cooking eggs.

This variation in treatment reveals a fundamental distinction between these two major tones on culinary matters. A distinction that mirrors the difference between the two great British universities that spawned them.

Supposedly, Cambridge is more likely to turn out philosophers and scientists while Oxford is likelier to produce poets and prime ministers. The books tend to corroborate the stereotype.

The light-hearted Oxford Companion is a dictionary with entries ranging from aardvark where the reader learns it tastes like pork to zuppainglese where the reader finds out why an Italian dessert has a name which means English soup.

The Cambridge study on the other hand is a collection of scholarly essays including essays on nutrition, food-related disorders and biotechnology.

Thus the companion is a book you're likely to curl up with -- even if it does weigh six pounds -- browse through and smile over every now and then. And it's less likely to remind you than the Cambridge volume with it's entries on obesity, genetically modified foods and coronary artery disease that sometimes what we eat is bad for our health.

Still, both of these works, though containing no recipes, will prove rewarding reading for anyone who finds food a consuming passion.

Tom Harte is a retired faculty member from Southeast Missouri State University where he was an award-winning teacher, a nationally recognized debate coach, and chair of the department of Speech Communication and Theatre.
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